@dangirsh, @cobblepot, I was going to do a quick test to prepare a reponse to this exchange; it turned out to be a rather lenghty write-up for that purpose. So I created a separate post; you might find some data and my conclusion useful: What does it feel like to work with 10,000 notes in Org-roam: Benchmarking Org-roam's search methods. Thank you, @cobblepot, for the link. It was very useful.